Facts versus Knowledge: The Role of Education

Cleaning up my home office, I just ran across a New York Times Book Review piece from October on "The Know It All," by A.J. Jacobs. The reviewer, Joe Queenan, has an interesting comment about facts vs. knowledge:

"The Know It All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World" is mesmerizingly uniformative. But this is hardly surprising, because the premise of the book is completely wrong. The animating idea of this misguided endeavor is that corralling a vast array of unrelated facts will, in and of itself, make a person more interesting. This is idiotic. Facts absorbed without context merely magnify the intellectual deficiencies of the autodidact, because a poorly educated person does not know which facts are important.

First Posting...Testie

This is my first posting to my newly created blog. I have always used the slightly odd (to others I assume), yet highly self-entertaining shorthand of "testie" for system testing. It is something that started back in my days as a Price Waterhouse consultant and I've never kicked. Well, now that that's done, time to check the testies.